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Let us, then, make a mental picture of our universe: each
member shall remain what it is, distinctly apart; yet all is to
form, as far as possible, a complete unity so that whatever comes
into view shall show as if it were the surface of the orb over
all, bringing immediately with it the vision, on the one plane,
of the sun and of all the stars with earth and sea and all living
things as if exhibited upon a transparent globe.
Bring this vision actually before your sight, so that there shall
be in your mind the gleaming representation of a sphere, a
picture holding sprung, themselves, of that universe and repose
or some at rest, some in motion. Keep this sphere before you, and
from it imagine another, a sphere stripped of magnitude and of
spatial differences; cast out your inborn sense of Matter, taking
care not merely to attenuate it: call on God, maker of the sphere
whose image you now hold, and pray Him to enter. And may He come
bringing His own Universe with all the Gods that dwell in it- He
who is the one God and all the gods, where each is all, blending
into a unity, distinct in powers but all one god in virtue of
that one divine power of many facets.
More truly, this is the one God who is all the gods; for, in the
coming to be of all those, this, the one, has suffered no
diminishing. He and all have one existence while each again is
distinct. It is distinction by state without interval: there is
no outward form to set one here and another there and to prevent
any from being an entire identity; yet there is no sharing of
parts from one to another. Nor is each of those divine wholes a
power in fragment, a power totalling to the sum of the measurable
segments: the divine is one all-power, reaching out to infinity,
powerful to infinity; and so great is God that his very members
are infinites. What place can be named to which He does not
reach?
Great, too, is this firmament of ours and all the powers
constellated within it, but it would be greater still,
unspeakably, but that there is inbound in it something of the
petty power of body; no doubt the powers of fire and other bodily
substances might themselves be thought very great, but in fact,
it is through their failure in the true power that we see them
burning, destroying, wearing things away, and slaving towards the
production of life; they destroy because they are themselves in
process of destruction, and they produce because they belong to
the realm of the produced.
The power in that other world has merely Being and Beauty of
Being. Beauty without Being could not be, nor Being voided of
Beauty: abandoned of Beauty, Being loses something of its
essence. Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty;
and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate
which is the cause of the other, where the nature is one? The
very figment of Being needs some imposed image of Beauty to make
it passable and even to ensure its existence; it exists to the
degree in which it has taken some share in the beauty of Idea;
and the more deeply it has drawn on this, the less imperfect it
is, precisely because the nature which is essentially the
beautiful has entered into it the more intimately.
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